Vacation 2004: Ceramic's Fate

You have already seen how section of Ceramics craft started. You have seen those serious and optimistical, enlightened faces of participants. They followed the whole process of doing things from raw material to ready things. giving a shape to material was just one part of the fun, the culmination happened during one of the last days of Festival. It was a day, or should I say night, of a big bonfire. BIG, I mean. Vadim, the teacher, was carefully designing the bonfire from the beginning. It was not an easy task, because using just plain bonfire usually does not give enough heat to process ceramics...



The whole evening people were picking fuel throughtout the island, gathering it in big heaps. The thinnest branches were used for warming up raw ceramic at the beginning. It was getting dark when bonfire was burning at full scale. People started to dance shamanic dances around the bonfire to add an extra heat to the process... Fire was looking like a demonic animals sometimes. Look at this horse of fire:



Guys and girls were taking care about bonfire the whole night and met the sunrise afterwards. Ceramic was waiting for its temperature to low enough levels to withdraw it from the bonfire. Around 8 am next day the first things were excavated... and the results were surprisingly bad for Vadim. Shamanic dances and people enthusiasm made an impossible thing - temperature of fire was much higher than it could theoretically be using this kind of fuel. Too few things survived the last stage of the process. On the picture below you can see grim faces of Vadim and Co.



But the main thing was the process, and not the results. People felt happy about the section, because it gave invaluable experience of doing things without any modern tools.